Outsourcing Business Processes for Innovation – Volume II

In an increasingly connected world, an unexpected failure or server downtime is a reason enough for customers to jump ship. Also, it does not bode well for your business and ditto for all the stakeholders. Organizations across the board are cutting down on budgets and managers are expected to achieve more with less. Technology is getting increasingly sophisticated regardless of where or how it is utilized. Thus outsourcing comes as a godsend for companies not just in cutting costs but for chasing some very far-reaching business innovation in the process. This is the following part of Volume I on Outsourcing Business Processes for Innovation.

Software applications are the backbone of any business enterprise irrespective of the industry type. A lot of applications are critical to the smooth and efficient running of enterprises and as such have to be dealt with fully proficient professionals at all times. Managing everything in-house is backbreaking work and keeps companies from concentrating on their core competencies. Thus an outsourcing partner can assist by doing all the heavy lifting while letting brands do what they do best – build and sell.

By outsourcing software application development, maintenance, and security it is possible to gain some definitive competitive advantage. By thoroughly understanding your business needs and providing bespoke software solutions your IT outsourcing partner can be an inseparable entity to your company.

It is possible to achieve reduced costs, lower risks, better return on your investment, quicker reach to the market, faster response to changing customer needs and staying on top of evolving market dynamics. All this and more along with the innovative approaches and ideas that the partner brings to the table can lead to achieving the long-term goals of the business enterprise in a very convincing way.

Another arena in which outsourcing plays a key role is in back office operations. There are a lot of time-consuming and iterative tasks that can be conveniently outsourced. It is also possible to get some innovative approaches to dealing with back office operations courtesy of outsourcing. The domain expertise possessed by the partner can help to look for cost overruns, time delays, inefficient routines, redundant processes and so on in order to come up with an agile and lean operational mechanism for the back end processes.

You can also attain contact center innovation through a smart outsourcing decision. Use of technology to come up with predictive analysis, pattern detection, an anticipation of customer problems, speedy resolution of customer grievances are all part of the grand scheme of things here. But even more, than that, your contact center could be a fertile ground to look for improved opportunities to upsell and cross-sell your products thanks to the data insights provided by the outsourcing partner.

Your financial service needs can also be outsourced to competent entities to help you concentrate more on product development and sales. The financial jungle can be a real intimidating place for enterprises regardless of their size. There are a lot of regulatory and compliance issues plus handling the accounting and finance services can be a little tricky at times even for the best companies in the world. So delegating this finance domain to an expert saves the time and money to having to do it yourself. For example, a financial institute which is into providing mortgage loans could very well benefit from a mortgage service provider that has the core focus on end-to-end mortgage services like origination, servicing, and customer contact.

So outsourcing helps companies to quickly strive for excellence using proven business methodologies and ensuring business continuity and growth by reducing cost overheads and firmly treading on the path of innovation regardless of what the future has in store for the sector in general.

Here is a quick checklist of what outsourcing can do for your business:

• Provide access to industry-leading knowledge
• Predict the future with a fair degree of accuracy
• Optimize existing business process to match with the best
• Get a swift performance boost and competitive edge
• Achieve business goals in a timely fashion
• The opportunity to paint on a bigger canvas